This post is being cross-posted from Urbanter, the official student blog of the Program on Urban Studies.  On Wednesday I was lucky enough to be invited to the Institute for the Future’s Technology Horizons 2011 Fall Conference for a workshop on the bottom-up innovations of the smart city. I will be writing [...]

Yunus Cengal and Michael Boles’ Thermodynamics: an Engineering Approach is the standard thermodynamics textbook in colleges across the country. I wouldn’t normally pick it up to read over the summer, but preparations for the 2011-2012 TA season promote surprisingly odd behavior. The book starts with a comfortable introductory chapter, guaranteed [...]

A July 14th opinion piece in the Stanford Daily by Holly Moeller, a PhD student, explores the pleasures, ironies, and pitfalls of the increasing prevalence of breathtaking digital images of the natural world.  What does seeing images like the one below , pulled from Flickr more or less at random, do to [...]